Chapter 18 #2
Grewin looked as he always had—impeccably dressed, insufferably pleased with himself. But there was something in his expression that made her want to retreat, something wolfish behind the charming mask.
Kitty took her place beside Grewin like a woman led to slaughter.
“Ohhhh, darlings—” Lady Mulberry’s voice oozed like spilt honey, her feathered fan fluttering with exaggerated emphasis. “We simply must begin with Act Three, Scene Two. That delicious little lovers’ exchange—so fraught with passion, don’t you agree?”
She paused, letting her gaze slither toward Kitty with reptilian delight, the corners of her rouged lips twitching. “Or… is there some objection to Portia and Bassanio’s tender love declaration?”
The question hung, while her rings glittered in cruel emphasis with every affected gesture.
Of course it would be that part.
Kitty stood with her legs tightly clenched together, her hands trembling slightly as she unfolded the pages.
Never had she longed for Norman’s presence with such desperate intensity. The absence of his familiar figure in that moment struck her like a physical blow—how cruelly the drawing-room air thickened without his steadying presence to anchor her.
However tangled her sentiments toward him might’ve been, he remained her harbor in this storm of Mulberry’s making.
And Grewin. Grewin.
Her gloves strained against her whitening knuckles, as his laughter slithered through the room.
Every fiber of her being recoiled—from the oiled smoothness of his voice, from the way his gaze lingered too long on her body.
That he should be here now, of all possible men, while Norman was conspicuously elsewhere—
It was nothing short of torture.
She did not feel safe now.
Grewin’s voice slithered into the air with his first line—Bassanio’s declaration of love. It was too smooth, too practiced, as if he’d memorized not just the words but how to stain them with his own intent.
“You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand—such as I am...”
Kitty responded, her eyes fixed on the page. “You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand...”
Her voice was a shade too quiet, a tremor behind the syllables. She tried again, this time firmer.
“You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, such as I am, though for myself alone I would not be ambitious in my wish...”
He leaned closer than he ought to, his thigh brushing hers. Her breath caught in her throat.
“...to wish myself much better,” she continued, forcing herself not to move away, not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her recoil. “Yet for you I would be trebled twenty times myself.”
He murmured, too low for the others to hear, “If only you meant it, dearest. You and I could be trebled together.”
Her eyes snapped to him. His smile was the same lazy twist of the mouth she remembered from that awful night in the courtyard.
She turned back to the page, her voice steady now not from confidence, but from sheer rage.
“A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich—”
He murmured again. “I could make you rich. You wouldn’t have to marry him. You know that, don’t you?”
Kitty kept her eyes on the page but tilted her chin toward him just enough to hiss, “If you say another word not written by Shakespeare, I will make quite certain everyone here hears precisely what you are.”
He chuckled, unbothered. It boiled her blood.
She continued reading, pushing each line out like venom.
“Only my blood speaks to you in my veins...”
God, how the words burned. The poetry mocked her, mocked everything she was trying to protect.
Norman should have been here. This scene should have been theirs. She could almost hear how he would have stumbled on the phrasing, how he would have looked at her instead of the script, as if she were the only thing anchoring him to the moment.
Instead, Grewin’s cologne filled her nose. A cloying, arrogant scent, too strong, like everything about him. She imagined stabbing the script straight into his hand. Or perhaps his eye.
“Such as I am,” she read, softer now, sadness threading through the anger, “I am yours.”
The words burned on her tongue—all the things she wished to say to Norman, the confessions and recriminations that might have bridged this unbearable distance between them.
But instead of his familiar presence, she was trapped beside him—this monstrous caricature of a gentleman whose very proximity made her skin prickle with revulsion.
A hot pressure built behind her eyes as the unshed tears thickened her throat.
She willed them away with furious blinks, her gloved fingers twisting in the folds of her skirt.
This was neither the time nor place for such weakness, yet the emotions rose unbidden—a dammed river threatening to breach its banks.
She opened her mouth, but the words caught like silk on a splintered rosebush. All that emerged was a shuddering breath that tasted of salt and humiliation.
He leaned in again, voice low. “You deserve a man who will claim you properly. Not one who hides.”
Her lips parted—to speak, to slap him, to scream. She wasn’t sure. But then the doors swung open furiously and the whole room stilled.
Kitty didn’t move. Her heart launched itself against her ribs. She couldn’t look at him. Not yet. Not with tears threatening.
Norman.
His voice, vibrating with uncontrolled fury, boomed across the room.
“What is he doing here? Who invited him?”
She heard the scrape of his boots on the floor, the unmistakable tension in his voice as he repeated, louder this time:
“Who invited the Marquess of Grewin into my home?”